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Late last night and early this morning, I wrote an article outlining one big reason robotaxis won’t replace car ownership to a very significant degree. There’s another big reason, sort of related to that, that a reader pointed out and explained well, and some other readers backed up in additional ways.
First of all, here’s the full comment from longtime reader “Defendor” on a glaring issue I didn’t even touch on in my article (though, he emphasized with bolding different points than I want to emphasize):
“We already have human driven ride hailing services, and in several major centers they have been joined by self driving cars. So far they are charging slightly more for self driven Waymo, than the Human driven Uber, so they aren’t really disrupting anything on price yet.
“Does anyone really expect dramatic reductions? Right now the human Uber driver is also paying for buying the car, insuring the car, maintaining the car, fueling the car, cleaning the car, storing the car… Right now with human ride hailing, Uber just takes a hefty share of ride revenue, and push all the costs onto the drivers.
